Back in fall I showed OSC my novel. Almost every scene, he said, there's no reason to come back to this character.

Radical rewrite. I'm getting that my characters are interesting (good! major change!) and that there's too much info at the beginning about the character.

Aristotle said you show character by what the person does. Got it -- but I was doing that before, and it wasn't enough.

I introduce 3 characters in Chapter 1. 1, everybody loves. 2, people like, but they don't like the plot summary at the beginning. They like it, I think, but they dont' like that it's plot summary. However, that would be a story in its own (maybe a good one!)

3, I've got bio interleaved into the events.

OSC said my novel had a format like The Stand. 12 pages introduce the first character. Yawwwwwwwwwwn. I just wanted the gas pumps to explode. But maybe I'm different from the average reader.

Does that 'plot summary' need to be there at all? Why summarize the plot rather than just letting it unfold as we read? Are you afraid we won't "get" it without the summary? Is that an indication of the amount of faith you have in your own writing?

All that character intro - could you trim out anything you are telling us that we can figure out on our own from watching and listening to the character?

Ask yourself seriously why you feel it necessary to do so much introduction for that character. Is it an indication that the story should start earlier? Have you not developed him/her thoroughly enough, so that he/she is incapable of presenting his/her own character through actions, thoughts and speech? Is that character trying to fill too many roles, such that you could consider splitting him/her into more than one character? Does that character not have enough of a role, such that you feel the need to "beef him/her up" with background material? Is it too soon for that character to appear in the story, such that you could reveal the background gradually before they finally do show up?

How would a POV shift affect this problem?

Is all that background material *really* necessary to the story?

Assuming the answer to the previous question is yes, does it all have to be revealed at the beginning, or could some of it be saved for different points later on, closer to where that information becomes relevant?

I mean a "hint" like the opening of THE UNLIKELY SPY by Daniel Silva --

Beatrice Pyn died because she missed the last bus to Ipswich.

Twenty minutes before her death she stood at the dreary bus stop and.....

or in SOCIAL CRIMES by Jane Stanton Hitchcock

Murder was never my goal in life. I'm a very sentimental person at heart. I cry in old movies. I love animals and children. I'm a pushover for a beggar in the street. So if anyone had told me five years ago that I could have willfully and with malice....(paragraph ends thusly) However, allow me to dwell for a moment on the last evening of what I think of as my innocence.

It was a perfect Southampton night, warm, starlit....

Both of those mention -- almost a tease -- something exciting. Being from the thriller genre, it's a death, but the idea is that the reader is promised something exciting/interesting IS coming up. Then follows some duller details leading away on the road to the interesting stuff.

In another thread, someone mentioned four-headed lizards living under a lake. The point is that we need to know about the four heads and the living underwater, so it's okay to stretch POV to get that information across. Things like whether the lizard is particularly happy or attractive or wealthy can come out in the narration easily enough. We don't need to know those things up front, because they fit neatly into our existing concepts.

Sometimes you're starting with a character who initially seems very typical and not particularly special, in which case something interesting happens to that character and not another, more interesting, character. But if you're talking about Big Powwow, the event that occurs happens to everybody in the story (at least, those in your first chapter). So you have to use the interesting characters to show the event. We can sort of guess at the reactions of the dull characters, or if we don't it's because we don't much care.

By "plot summary" I mean something along the lines of

Cheryl wasn't sure she'd drop by the reservation on the way to work. She was new to the tribe, so she still didn't feel like a part of it. Now that Granny had died, she no longer felt connected at all.

Then the Big Event The Story Is About happened.

or

John had this really big adventure with the evil robot monkeys that scarred him for life and made him twitch a lot. Everybody told him he was crazy and that evil robot monkeys didn't exist. He no longer reported to the police when he saw evil robot monkeys blowing up doghouses and making the milk curdle. (Go on for a few more sentences.) Then, one day, everybody found out how right he was.

I'm doing this stuff for 2 reasons: I want people to understand the characters -- to know what they're about -- so I need the info (I think); and it's not part of the current story, so I want to summarize it.

Talking to a friend last night helped me a little. He suggested that interleaving with the action some bio information, as thoughts of the MC was OK. He also suggested that if that bio information was there to explain what was going on in that moment, that turned it from bio to acceptable background.

I think I'll make another go at it and see what I think.